“Everything You Ever Dreamed Of?”
Five weeks before the wedding there are still no firm plans. Nothing has been decided regarding the ceremony. No musicians have been booked. There is no contingency plan for weather—no umbrellas ordered in case of rain. I have not asked about the lamb on a spit. In addition, there is no certainty that the Irish government will even allow the wedding since we didn’t turn in my divorce papers on time or my previous marriage certificate. And the documents we do have aren’t properly apostilled—I don’t even know what “apostilled” means.
A pleasant-sounding woman named Patricia from the General Register Office in Dublin, has been e-mailing with regularity, reminding us in the most charming way possible of the urgency to get the documents in because “it can take months,” she writes, for the paperwork to be filed, and there will be “nothing we can do” if everything is not in order.
“You need to get your divorce decree,” D keeps saying to me.
I have no idea where this is or if I ever even had a copy. I finally ask my ex-wife, who graciously says she will look in her safe-deposit box at her bank. The next day she calls with good news.
“I have it here,” she says.
“Great. You don’t by any chance happen to have a copy of our marriage certificate, do you?”
There’s a pause on the line. “In my safe-deposit box. At the bank. Where I just was,” she says patiently. “I’ll go back tomorrow.”
I call and ask my mother if she has a copy of my birth certificate.
“Well, I might,” she replies, “but if I do it’s up in a box at the back of the closet. I can’t reach it. I’ll ask the doorman if he can come up and pull it down. When do you need it?”
“A month ago.”
Half an hour later she calls back.
“Well, you’re in luck . . .”
When D sees it, she informs me that it’s not correct. “We need the long form.”
“There’s a long form?”
The day after my daughter’s fifth birthday, and exactly a month from the wedding day, I head to Los Angeles to direct a television show. Before I get back, D will have finished directing a play, met her writing deadline, and left with our daughter for Dublin.
On her way out of town, D stops to pick up her wedding dress. From the airport she calls me in Los Angeles. “It got rained on on the way home.”
“Let’s hope it’s the only time it gets rained on.”
Three weeks before the wedding there are still no firm plans.
Two weeks and two days before we are scheduled to get married, I am in Burbank, directing a scene in which a man is trapped under a piece of farm equipment; his left arm is broken just above his wrist and is gushing blood. For reasons I don’t understand, I am unusually tense while directing this scene. At a break in the filming, I check the messages on my phone. I have a missed call from my son’s gymnastics camp; the message asks me to please call back as soon as possible.
My son has broken his left arm, just above the wrist—in the exact spot as the man in the scene I am directing. An ambulance has taken my son to the hospital, his mother cannot be found, D is in Ireland. I am three thousand miles away.
Soon enough, my son’s mother joins him at the hospital, and after twelve hours and multiple doses of morphine, and the subsequent bouts of vomiting, he is sent home with a blue cast from his hand to his shoulder. In the photo my ex-wife sends me, my son looks small, pale, and defenseless.
In the week before I can get home, my mind is easily distracted. Perhaps I’m misplacing anxiety about the wedding onto my son, but I am preoccupied about his condition. I call his mother often to check on him. I have driven the streets of Los Angeles for nearly thirty years, but twice I take wrong turns on roads I have driven hundreds of times and find myself lost. One afternoon after work, on the way back to my friend’s home, where I am staying, I pull off to the side of the road and dial my phone.
“Hey, pal,” my father shouts over the line, the way he always does.
“Hey, Dad,” I choke out back to him.
He asks after D and the kids—I don’t mention my son’s arm. I ask after his wife. Then I ask if he is going to be able to come to the wedding. He had alerted D earlier that he had a scheduling conflict—it’s his wife’s birthday that weekend and they have already planned a cruise with some other members of her family. But it feels important to ask him myself.
“We’d—I’d—love to have you there, if you can make it,” I hear myself say.
“I’m still trying, pal, but the cruise is paid for. I tried calling the general manager, and I’m waiting to get a call back. But I’m trying.”
When we hang up I sit watching the cars roll past along Montana Avenue. I’m not sure if I’m disappointed or feel a sense of absolution. I had expected no other response, and it was pleasant to hear his voice. I turn and look over at my reflection in the window of a nearby cosmetics store.
Back in New York, nine days before we are scheduled to be married, the morning my son and I are supposed to leave for Ireland, his mother and I take him to the orthopedic surgeon. The doctor is a big man with an outsized personality. His glasses perch on the very tip of his nose. He inspects my son’s cast and quickly decides to change it.
“They did fine at the hospital, but let’s set this thing correctly, shall we?” While we wait for results from the new X-ray to come back, I broach the topic.
“So, doctor . . . we’re scheduled to get on a plane tonight, to Ireland—”
“What?” He glares at me.
“Yeah, I’m supposed to be getting mar—”
“No.” He interrupts me, his head shaking side to side. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no. This arm is not flying today. Not with this swelling and this fracture. Remember what happened to Serena Williams? She had a broken bone in her foot and flew to Hawaii and ended up with a blood clot in her lung. Almost died, and she’s a pro athlete. No, this boy isn’t flying for weeks. Not for several weeks.”
I am speechless.
My ex-wife steps in to help me out. “He’s getting married in Ireland next week.”
The doctor tilts his large head and lifts his hands in a “well, nothing we can do” gesture. The X-ray comes back and the doctor shows us the multiple fracture. The break is not clean; the bone has splintered.
“And there’s a chip in the wrist that they didn’t see at the hospital.” The doctor points to a spot on the black and white film. I sit glued to the small stool in the corner. I am numb. The doctor molds a new cast, assisted by his very young and very blond nurse. After a new cast is set, the doctor turns to me.
“Come here,” he says, and hurries out into the hall.
I follow.
“When’s your drop-dead date?”
While the doctor has been tending to my son, I have been asking myself that exact question. Today is Tuesday, August 16. My son and I were to fly to Galway, in the west of Ireland, tonight, and spend several days together. A father and son trip. D and our daughter were to join us there and we would all travel together for a few days, including a visit to the hotel where D and I first met. We had intended to come full circle, as a family, just before the wedding. Then we would all drive across the country to Dublin on Tuesday the twenty-third; get married in the registrar’s office on Wednesday the twenty-fourth, with D’s immediate family and a few friends present; and then on Sunday, August 28, have the more public wedding and celebration in the park.
“Next Monday, the twenty-second,” I say to the doctor—trying to convey in those few words the urgency I feel.
The doctor nods. “Okay.” He holds out his hands in a “stop” gesture. “Let me see what I can do. If the arm doesn’t slip and the swelling goes down, maybe we can make it work. Maybe. No guarantees. It’s a bad break, and with the air pressure in the plane—”
“I know, doctor,” I say, interrupting him. “But unless you can tell me he’s going to die on the plane, we’ve got to fly.”
The doctor laughs, and I wonder if I’m joking—knowing at the same time that if there was any risk at all, I would be getting married without my son. And I don’t know if I can do that. He is already worried about being left out of our family—not being in attendance on the wedding day could only exacerbate those feelings. What my son needs to do is be there in person, be a part of it and feel the love that surrounds him, rather than three thousand miles away, having to hear about it for the rest of his life.
I was not in attendance at my father’s second marriage—it is a history I am not interested in repeating. I was not speaking much with my father at the time when he remarried. I have always imagined that he—wrongly—assumed I wouldn’t have attended had I been invited. For that reason alone, I was never particularly hurt by the omission, but it certainly added further distance to an already remote relationship. My son has to be at my wedding.
The doctor smiles at me and makes a juggling gesture. Then he laughs again, slaps me on the shoulder, and marches back into the office.
That evening I let my son sleep in my bed. After he’s down, I call D. It’s late in Ireland.
“Where are you? You’re not on the plane?” Her voice is rising in panic.
I explain what the doctor said, leaving out the part that my son may not be allowed to fly at all, for weeks. “We’ll be there next Tuesday morning,” I say, hoping that my voice carries an assuredness I lack. “That way we’ll still be able to get married on Wednesday. It’s not a problem, we just won’t have our time together in the west beforehand.”
D doesn’t hear any of this; her sobbing is too loud.
When I climb into bed my son rolls over and slams me in the head with his cast.
“I’m sorry I can’t go to Ireland, Dad,” he says the next morning.
“I bet we’ll be able to go, kiddo, don’t worry.”
“No, the doctor said I couldn’t fly, didn’t you hear him?”
“I know, but—”
“I’ll die.”
Six days before D and I are scheduled to be married, my son and I go back to have the cast changed. I take the doctor aside. “How is it looking?”
“So far, so good. The swelling has gone down a lot. And already there’s bone being created. If you or I had that break there’d be a dozen metal pins in our arms. It’s great to be young.”
“So do you think we’ll be . . . ?”
“Maybe.”
“Would you mind going in and telling my son that if you let him fly he’s not going to die?”
“Yup, everything looked good, don’t worry,” I tell D when we connect on Skype. She’s in Killarney with her bridesmaid Louise. I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen her face. Over the computer screen I can see the crease between D’s eyebrows is deep; she looks strained. She knows I’m not telling her the whole truth.
The longer I see her, the more beautiful she becomes, and then her computer runs out of juice and she’s gone.
By the time I get to Ireland, if I get to Ireland, the day before the wedding, D and I will not have seen each other in nearly five weeks, the longest stretch since we met.
Later that evening I make my son take a bath for the first time since he broke his arm. I sit beside the tub and chat with him.
“I’m sorry this happened, Dad,” my son says at one point.
“Don’t you worry about it, we’re going to be fine.”
“I hope so.”
“Trust me, we will.” We chat some more about video games he wants that I won’t let him have, and then I get up to make a cup of tea. “Keep your cast out of the water,” I say as I leave the room.
“Don’t worry, Dad. I know,” he says. Within seconds I hear him holler, “Oh, no!”
“What happened?” I rush back into the bathroom.
“I forgot. I started to lie down and I forgot.”
“Are you kidding me? I told you five seconds ago!”
“I know, I’m sorry! I forgot!”
“Get out.” The cast is dripping.
I call D.
“Where’s the hair dryer?”
“Hello, my luv. What? Why do you want the hair dryer?”
“Don’t ask. Do you know where it is?”
“Oh, no,” she gasps, comprehending instantly. “Bottom of the closet, right-hand corner.”
I pat down the cast and wave the blow-dryer over it. “Is it wet inside?”
“No, not really.” Neither of us wants the cast to be wet, but we both know that it is. Despite my son’s still occasional misgivings about the impending marriage, he is looking forward to going to Ireland. I flip off the dryer. The corners of his mouth begin to turn up and we both burst out laughing.
“Shit.”
“Dad, you said the S-word.”
Once my son is asleep beside me—before this week he hadn’t slept in bed with me for several years—I try to take stock of the situation. I consider the various permutations and possibilities for the next week and what they might mean, both for the immediate future and down the line. After an hour of this my nerves are so on edge I get out of bed and take my first bath in memory.
In the morning, I call the doctor’s office, but he’s taking Fridays off during the summer.
“Well, maybe it’s not that wet,” I say to the receptionist. “We can wait till Monday.”
“Hold on,” the receptionist says, and then a minute later she comes back on the line. “No. If he got it wet, then it has to be changed. The nurse is here, she’ll change it, then the doctor can look at it again on Monday.”
We go down and Judy, the same attractive blond nurse, slices open the cast; the interior gauze is matted and soaked through.
“You had to get this changed, no question.” Judy turns to me, her green eyes glowing. “See how the skin is already beginning to be affected?” She shakes her head. “This is not good.” She gets to work on the arm. Her long, loose blond hair falls over my son’s shoulder as she manipulates his arm; her thin and well-manicured fingers squeeze just below his wrist. And then my son’s arm gets another X-ray.
When Judy compares the X-ray from a few days ago to the new one, the bone looks more off kilter than before. Even my son notices.
“The new X-ray looked worse,” he says in the cab on our way back home. “Didn’t it, Dad?”
“No.” I lie to us both. “They looked exactly the same. We’ll be fine.”
On Saturday, four days before D and I are supposed to be married, my apostilled birth certificate arrives in the mail. What would we have done for paperwork if my son hadn’t broken his arm and needed to stay in New York?
I call D to let her know.
“Has mine come?” D’s birth certificate is more complicated. Since she was born in Vienna, it is in German and needs to be translated, reissued, and then apostilled, which adds another step to the already convoluted process.
“We don’t have that yet?”
“I told you about it. Did you call that guy?”
“What guy?”
“I have a guy expediting it, it should have been delivered by messenger.”
“Oh.”
D gives me a name and number and I call.
“Who?” the heavily accented voice on the phone shouts.
I spell the name.
“Oh, yeah. That should be back in a week to ten days,” he says.
“No, no, no. We fly in two days, I need it now,” I explain.
“Oh, no one told me it was urgent, let me make a call. They’re closed today, but I’ll call on Monday.”
“I really need it, we fly Monday night,” I insist.
“I’ll do my best,” he tells me.
On Sunday, three days before we are scheduled to get married, and a week before the wedding party, D tells me, “My parents want to have the ceili at their house.”
“I thought it was going to be at the hotel. It was all set.”
“Well, they’ve ordered a second Dumpster, to throw out stuff. They have the room now,” she explains.
“It’s still on Sunday, after the ceremony, right?”
“Well, we’re meeting to discuss that, at my parents’ house tonight. There’s some thinking that it might be nice to have it after my parents’ dinner, keep it all in one setting, at one time.”
“Oh.”
“You just get on the plane.”
On Monday morning, two days before D and I are scheduled to get married in Dublin, my son and I head back to the doctor in midtown Manhattan. Yet another X-ray is taken. The doctor slaps it up into the light board. He silently squints at the giant negative. He compares it to the original film, taking one down and replacing it with the other, then again, and again, back and forth, then he sits down beside my son.
“Lie down,” he orders.
My son lies back on the doctor’s table.
The doctor wraps his large hands around my son’s small arm. He closes his eyes and tilts his head forward, his ear very close to the arm, as if he’s listening. He begins to squeeze. My son giggles until he yelps, “Oww!”
“Don’t move,” the doctor barks. He manipulates the arm some more; my son shoots me a look. When the doctor releases the arm, he sits back and looks up at me. “Let’s put a new cast on this arm and get you two on a plane.”
“Where is it?” I shout into the phone.
“Someone tried to deliver it at one thirty, there was no one home,” the man with the heavily accented voice says.
“We were here at one thirty.”
My son grabs my arm. “Dad, the buzzer doesn’t work, remember?”
“Oh, shit,” I say.
“Dad, you said the S-wo—”
“Please,” I hiss at him.
“Would you like me to try and redeliver it?” the man on the phone asks.
“Yes, now. I have to leave for the airport in half an hour, I need that birth certificate.”
“I’ll call them and see.”
“No! Not call them and see. Tell them to get here now! I’m late. Please!” I’m aware that I’m screeching.
In two minutes the phone rings. “I have the messenger on the other line, he’s waiting to hear—”
“Why is he waiting, get him here now! Now!”
“He can get there by three, not two forty-five.”
“Just get him here now!”
My son and I go downstairs and pile up our bags on the sidewalk. The car service arrives.
“I have to wait a few minutes, something is being delivered,” I tell the driver.
“I’m not waiting. Pickup is two forty-five. I have other jobs,” the driver replies. He starts the car. I hand him a ten-dollar bill through the window. “It’ll just be a few minutes.”
“I’ll wait ten minutes,” he says.
“You should have gotten the good car service, Dad,” my son complains. “This one always smells funny.”
At 2:59, from around the corner, a short, daydreamy guy in a white messenger T-shirt is strolling slow and easy up the street with a rolling gait. I rush at him. “Are you here for McCarthy?”
“Huh?”
“Are you here for McCarthy?”
He looks down at the envelope. I look and see that my future wife’s name is on it. “Nope.” He shakes his head.
“That’s me,” I grab the envelope out of his hand, dive into the car, and we’re gone.
At the airport ticket counter I tell my son to pull his sleeve down over his cast and wait by the wall, away from me, because I’ve forgotten both the letter from the doctor saying that the cast has been bivalved and poses no medical threat to the patient and that he is approved to fly, and also the letter from my son’s mother allowing him to be taken out of the country by only one of his parents. Both these letters are still sitting beside the phone where I was screaming to the man with the heavy accent trying to get the translated and apostilled birth certificate. Luckily, no one at the airport seems to care about such formalities, and after I watch my son play a few of the normally forbidden video games, we’re in the air for an overnight flight.
My relationship with Ireland has been long and complex. I first arrived in Dublin, with Seve, in the mid-eighties. We were young and free. Ireland was on its knees, in the throes of a deep and protracted recession. We came over from London for a weekend and stayed three weeks. We rented a car and drove, without a plan, moving from one village to the next, meeting welcoming people, playing terrible golf on beautiful courses, drinking too much in the local pubs (enough to occasionally get up and sing), and eventually ending up on the western coast, just outside the village of Doolin, at a small, family-run hotel. It became our spot.
The O’Callaghans welcomed us back like family every year. Seve’s and my annual pilgrimage was a stabilizing and rejuvenating ritual. And then one year we were too busy to go, and then another year passed, and then it had been a decade since I’d been back.
Then came the trip when D and I first met. In my absence, the Celtic Tiger had made Ireland rich. I had become a husband and then a father. I was more wary, and weary, than I had been the last time I visited.
Now, because of D, I was traveling to Dublin several times a year. I took her out to the O’Callaghans’ in Doolin, but mostly we stayed in Dublin, close to her family and friends. I got to know the city by simply going places as part of daily life. Then we bought a home, a few blocks from D’s parents. My relationship with Ireland became more complex, including familial relationships, obligations, and bills.
At times I’ve resented the incessant pull Dublin has exerted over us, and D’s determination to keep Ireland an active part of her life—and consequently our life—has been a source of tension.
“We can’t live in two places,” I eventually said to her.
“Well, I can,” was her response.
The children, like D, have no complex feelings about Ireland. They love being spoiled by Granny and Granddad and relish the feeling of freedom and independence they have here.
My son also loves talking to Irish taxi drivers. And on this morning, after neither of us slept on the flight over, he is chattering away to the driver about all the different places he lives, and why it’s still so dark out, and does the driver know that they sell Pringles on the plane and that he had three full tins on the flight over?
We pull up to an ivy-covered wall down a small lane and knock on a heavy wooden door. It’s a small hotel not far from where the wedding will take place. That we’re not staying in our house is yet another result of our loose planning.
As with most second homes, the purchase was an emotional decision, not a practical one. We stay at our small cottage—originally used to house the workers on the Rathmines tramway line—just a few times a year, though D sneaks home more regularly. But often, when the house sits empty, we rent it out.
When we set our wedding date for August 28, we assumed that we would do the legal ceremony on the Friday the twenty-sixth. When we finally checked, we discovered that the registrar was booked. The closest day we could get married on was Wednesday the twenty-fourth. By then we had rented out the house to a Canadian couple until the twenty-fifth. So we will all be piled into one hotel room on the morning D and I will finally be legally married.
As my son and I enter room six, the heavy curtains are drawn against the dim light of a slate-gray Irish dawn. The unfamiliar room is in complete darkness and my son bumps hard against something.
“Ow!”
“Shh,” I whisper.
My eyes adjust to the darkness. D and our daughter are asleep in the large bed that my son has just slammed against. The rollaway cot by the bathroom is empty, the blankets turned down, waiting. Quickly, I get my exhausted son undressed and into the cot. Within minutes he’s asleep and I crawl into the large bed beside D. She rolls over and her eyes, puffy with sleep, open. She smiles and moves closer to me, her body luscious with the heat of sleep. She always looks so young when I first see her, and glimpsing her face now, in this shadowy light of dawn, is no exception. Then our daughter’s head pops over her shoulder.
“Daddy!”
Six hours later, D wakes me with a shake. The curtains are open and the hotel room is flooded with light.
“Come on, luv. We need to get going. We have a meeting with Patricia in an hour.”
We hurry over to Joyce House, to the Civil Registration Office of Births, Marriages, and Deaths, on Lombard Street East. It’s a part of town I don’t know; the buildings are low and brick, and with the dirty gray sky, it feels like it could be 1930, the way certain streets of Dublin still feel. Past a battered security desk, through a lobby that smells of stale smoke, up a flight of stairs, in the corner of a dingy beige room with worn blue carpet, behind a metal desk by a dirty window overlooking the local authority housing project across the street, Patricia Traynor, a small, middle-aged woman with a charming face, sensibly cut blond hair, and blue eyes behind thick glasses, rises from a metal chair and strides across the room to greet us like we’re old friends.
“After all our e-mails, I feel like I know you,” she says in a Cavan accent softened by twenty years in the big city. We shake hands and settle into the two plastic chairs across the desk from her.
For all the apparent disregard for detail and organization that D displays, I have never known her to be late for an event, miss a deadline, or forget an appointment. I once asked her why she didn’t write things down. “Maybe make a list,” I suggested.
“Then I’d have to remember to look at it,” she said, “just one more thing I’d have to keep in my head.”
Out of a file she slips from her handbag, D produces all of our necessary paperwork. “Sign here,” she tells me, pointing to a form I’ve never seen. “And here.” I have no idea what I just signed. D hands the file over to Patricia.
Patricia looks through all our paperwork. “Perfect,” she says. “Now I just need to ask you a few questions, and you need to look over the list of possible impediments to marriage.”
She hands us a two-sided sheet of paper. There is the predictable warning against marrying if one of the parties is already married or if there is a mental impairment. And then there is a long list of connections between the two parties that cannot exist in order for the wedding to take place. A man may not marry his grandmother, his wife’s grandmother, his mother’s sister, or his mother’s brother’s sister or daughter, brother’s son’s wife, wife’s brother’s daughter, daughter’s son’s wife, wife’s son’s daughter, wife’s father’s sister, and so on.
The list of impediments to who a woman can marry is similarly restricted.
“I’m not sure, but I think we’re clear,” I say.
“Now, Andrew”—Patricia looks at me over her glasses—“I need for you to be absolutely sure.”
D jumps in. “He’s just jet-lagged,” she says, patting my knee a little harder than necessary.
“I’m joking, we’re safe,” I say. I decide not to mention that D’s mother’s maiden name is also McCarthy and that our ancestors are from the same region of Cork.
We chat a bit more, then Patricia says, “This isn’t a highly exhaustive interview, but you seem at first glance to be of sound mind”—she gives me a look—“if a bit sleepy. I prescribe a good night’s rest before the ceremony tomorrow.”
I feel like I’m in grade school and have just handed in a sloppy book report.
Patricia tells us that she’ll be the one conducting the civil ceremony in the morning. Both D and I are pleased by this news. I had neglected to consider who might be marrying us in this legal portion of our two-part, multiday nuptials, worrying only about D’s friend Shelly, who will be conducting the service on Sunday.
“And unless you have music, or someone is reading poetry or something, it should last about ten minutes.”
“That’s all?” I ask.
“That’s it,” Patricia answers. “Oh, do you have rings?”
“Maybe,” D says. “No,” I say, overlapping.
“Well.” Patricia looks back and forth between the two of us—her face reveals nothing. “You can decide and let me know before the ceremony.”
Out on the street, the Dublin August feels like a New York autumn. The wind is blowing, the sky is low, and there’s a chill in the air.
“Rings?” I ask.
“Do you not want to wear rings?”
“No, I’m good to wear a ring,” I say. “It’s just that you said you didn’t want a ring, remember? That we didn’t need them. We did talk about this.”
“Well, I remembered a jeweler I know, she could make us nice ones.”
“By tomorrow?”
D calls her friend the jeweler, who tells D that some of her work is on display over at the Kilkenny shop on Nassau Street. We head over. This part of town is always humming. Trinity College, with the Book of Kells, is across the street. A few blocks away, the Grafton Street pedestrian mall buzzes at all hours with shoppers, street performers, flower salesmen, people watchers. The twenty-two-acre St. Stephen’s Green, the soul of south Dublin, is a few blocks away.
D quickly finds a ring she likes, but it is slightly large on her.
“We could have that fitted for you,” the salesgirl behind the counter says. “When’s the wedding?”
“Tomorrow morning,” D says, as her phone rings.
“Tomorrow morning?” The young salesgirl is horrified.
But D isn’t paying attention; she’s on the phone, ordering our wedding cake for the Sunday ceremony. “I’m kind of busy tomorrow morning—” I hear her say.
“Kind of busy?” I interrupt.
D waves me off. “—but maybe I could swing by and take a look at them late in the day, or is there a photo of the cakes on your website?”
The salesgirl watches this exchange, turns her back, and simply walks away from us. I lead D out the door and back onto the street. The idea of rings is discarded without further discussion.
We go around the corner to the Shelbourne Hotel on St. Stephen’s Green and head to the bar. There’s an elegant, happy chaos to the room. While D sips a glass of wine and I chug a club soda, she says, “Maybe we should switch back the Friday night ‘welcome cocktails’ to here, instead of the Merrion. There’s more atmosphere here. It’ll be more fun for the Americans.”
“Isn’t it all set? Booked and everything?”
But D is already leaning over the bar, asking to speak with the manager.
The girls are sound asleep. My son and I are sitting in the hallway, outside our hotel room, reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, under a dim lamp. It’s one thirty in the morning. We’re reading about Augustus Gloop, who falls into the chocolate river and is sucked down a drain. We’re both exhausted, but neither of us can sleep. Jet lag has us in its grip. Eventually we go to bed and pass out.
But by eight A.M. we are all up and moving—there is a lot to do, like get married. I rummage through my bag and can’t find my razor blades. I have a clear recollection of packing them in New York, but they are nowhere in my suitcase, which is crammed up under the window, on top of my son’s and daughter’s bags, the contents of which have exploded all over the room.
“I’ll be right back,” I say, and head to the door. D is calling after me as I go, but I keep going. I need some air—and razor blades.
Outside, it is a bright, cool morning. I feel a thin breeze blowing from the east, while above, rolling white clouds race across the sky from the west. I walk over Leeson Street Bridge and see two swans down beside the canal. The canal used to be the far reaches of town a few centuries ago and it’s more residential here than in the center. D used to live around the corner—going for a late-night quart of milk or an early morning, jet-lag-induced walk, these are the first streets of Dublin I got to know intimately. As I walk, aware of my personal history here, I realize how much I have invested in this relationship. I’m conscious of the rhythm of my steps, the swing of my arms, the fall of my feet. I’m grateful for the few minutes alone. Suddenly I’m singing a Bruce Springsteen song: May your strength give us strength / May your faith give us faith . . .
My prayer for the day.
When I return with the plastic razors, D and my daughter are gone. My son is in the breakfast room. In an unspoken agreement that I not see D before the wedding, a series of accidentally well-choreographed things are happening. The girls have gone off to get their hair done. While they are gone, my son and I will dress; my best man, Seve—who arrived yesterday—will pick us up; and we will walk over to the Civil Registration Office. After we leave, D will return and get dressed, her father will collect her, and we will all rendezvous at 10:25, in time to get married.
While I’m shaving I have a clear memory of doing this same thing on the morning of my first wedding. I picture the light coming in from my left and the old bathroom mirror, its chipped corner. I distinctly remember the care and ease with which I shaved and the closeness I achieved. While I’m reliving this, I cut myself badly by my right ear. Blood flows and it is difficult to stop.
“Well at least I’m not repeating the past,” I say aloud, trying not to see any kind of metaphorical meaning in this insistent bloodletting.
“What did you say, Dad?” my son shouts from outside the bathroom.
Seve arrives and hustles us out the door. We walk along the Grand Canal, past a half dozen mallard ducks. My son is prancing, skipping, running, up and back along the path. Seve strides beside me; his is a walk I’ve known so well for so long. There are no two people I would rather be with on my way to get married today. I ask Seve to take a photo of my son and me as we walk. My son isn’t interested, and Seve isn’t fast enough. My feelings are suddenly hurt. I keep it to myself—I am not nearly as relaxed as I thought I was.
We leave the serenity of the canal and turn onto Fitzwilliam Place. Buses and motorcycles roar past, racing into the heart of Dublin. In the sudden cacophony I feel as if a layer of my skin has been removed; the chaos and noise grate on my now-jangling nerves, my shoulders hunch against the onslaught. Then we can’t find the registrar’s office.
“Wasn’t this your job, Seve?”
We go into a Spar market to ask for help. “Can I get a Coke and some potato chips, Dad?” my son asks.
“It’s ten in the morning,” I say.
“So?”
“Fine.”
“Yes!” He pumps his fist. “Seve, I haven’t gotten to have a Coke in months!”
The building we’re looking for is just across the street. We’re the first to arrive. Suddenly I wonder if anyone will show up.
I know my father won’t be here; I never heard from him again—but I didn’t expect that I would. My mother and eldest brother, Stephen, won’t get in until Friday. Neither of my other two brothers could make it. Peter, a college professor, began his semester this week and couldn’t get away, and Justin is absorbed in work of his own. I wish they were here. But the casually affectionate distance that has come to define our relationships prevented me from letting them know just how much their presence would have meant to me.
The glass entry of the Civil Registration Office is at the end of an elegant internal courtyard. There is a small lobby area, and beyond, a blue-carpeted room with six rows of ten chairs each, fixed into the ground, inclining toward the front of the room, where there is a half-moon-shaped desk, with one chair behind it and four chairs around the semicircle. Improbably, the room has an air of hopefulness about it, yet I’m disappointed that the ceremony will apparently take place sitting down. The back wall is covered in wood paneling.
I turn back and look up through the glass doors and see D’s three brothers arrive; they’re laughing. Then her parents are there, our daughter in her granddad’s arms, and three of D’s friends—her witness, Jackie, and two bridesmaids, Louise and Karen, D’s oldest friends. And then I see D. She is in an elegant silver-blue, form-hugging dress.
I wait where I am, down by the desk. The others come in and there are hugs and nervous laughter. I kiss D on the cheek.
“You look very beautiful,” I tell her.
She smiles broadly; she is excited, nervous, self-possessed, and appears to me both very strong and very vulnerable. My son has been jumping around the room, but when the others arrive he becomes quiet and goes to sit in the last row, in the farthest seat on the end. D’s parents try to hug him and he resists them. His sister goes to him, but he waves her away. I ask him to come down front, with the others. He refuses.
Much of my son’s anxiety about being left out of the family has been addressed again and again over the past months, and he’s been in bright spirits since we arrived in Dublin—until this moment. Suddenly, his fears seem to have returned, as I worried they might.
I go to him and whisper, with urgency, “I need you to come down front, now.”
“No,” he says. His eyes are burning.
I am very close to letting my nerves fuel a lash of anger.
“Please,” I hiss. I turn and ask one of D’s brothers, Colm Jr., whom my son is very fond of, to sit with him down front.
“Come on,” Colm Jr. shouts, waving to my son.
By an act of grace my son rises, shuffles down to the front row, and plops himself beside D’s brother.
Patricia appears from behind the wood-paneled wall. She instructs us to sit. Seve flanks me on my right, D is on my left, and Jackie is beside her. Patricia sits behind the desk, and without a formal beginning, the ceremony begins.
Patricia goes through some of the legal protocol. I feel a sense of calm about the proceedings that proves to be false when Patricia asks us to sign the binding document, and I begin to sign the wrong line. Seve stops me and points out the correct spot.
Then Patricia asks us all to stand. D and I turn toward each other and hold hands. Suddenly the room is filled with an intensity and gravity that until then hadn’t been much more than a vaguely implied possibility but now galvanizes and gathers around us with force. My body begins to heat up. No false calm now; I’m here, and there’s a lot going on. D’s gaze is filled with purpose; she anchors the room. I look back at Patricia when she addresses me and begins to recite the vows.
I, Andrew McCarthy, do solemnly and sincerely declare . . .
I look back at D and begin to smile in embarrassment, but the gravity in D’s face settles me. I begin to repeat after Patricia.
“I, Andrew McCarthy, do solemnly and sincerely declare . . .” I’m somehow surprised that this is what I am actually saying. I don’t know what I expected to say, since the specifics of traditional vows were never mentioned in our meeting yesterday, but in speaking these words, without anticipating their pronouncement, I hear them and contemplate their meaning in a way I might not have otherwise. As I echo Patricia, our voices take on a rhythm and I gather confidence.
. . . love her, and comfort her . . .
“. . . love her, and comfort her . . .”
. . . in sickness and in health . . .
“. . . in sickness and in health . . .”
. . . for so long as we both shall live . . .
“. . . for so long as we both shall live . . .”
When I’ve completed my vows Patricia turns to D, whose gaze on me never wavers. I can’t help but grin at her when she begins to recite her vows. The corners of her lips turn up and then she gathers herself again.
When D has finished her vows, we share a look that seems to say, “Yes, we just said all that to each other.” It feels as if we are huge and growing—like that night when I was a child, in the snow under the stars in my front yard, and then again in Spain, by the side of the barn while walking the camino. I can sense the others around us. Without looking, I know where each one is standing. The room seems to be pulsing. The look in D’s eyes lets me know that she feels it too. She exhales deeply, calling on more of the swelling energy, riding the wave. And then she has the largest smile on her face, and then we’re kissing.
When we emerge from our embrace, D shrugs, and everyone laughs. Perspective returns to normal and the hugging begins. The laughter is more relaxed now.
Our daughter jumps up into both our arms, D’s brothers slap my back, her parents kiss and hug me. Seve shakes my hand with sincerity.
“Congratulations, my friend. Nice work.”
My son has moved and sits up against a wall, behind a partition, partially hidden from view. As the others begin to organize toward the door, I go to him, and there are tears in his eyes. I hug him.
“That was a lot, huh?”
“I guess.”
“I love you so much,” I say.
“Don’t say that, Dad, you don’t.” And the tears roll down his cheeks.
“More than you can ever understand.” We sit in silence for a minute, with only the sound of his sniffling. “Come on,” I say after a while, “let’s go.” Seve comes to join us and my son wipes his eyes and we’re on the street.
The girls take a cab to the Merrion Hotel, where we have reserved a room in Patrick Guilbaud’s restaurant. The boys decide to walk in the blustery midday through Merrion Square. The park is in full bloom. We pass the playful statue of Oscar Wilde reclining on a large stone.
We spend a long and lazy afternoon eating rich food around a large, elegant table, then return to our hotel and all fall into bed. The next morning we maneuver a dozen bags into a taxi and head home.
Everyone silently goes off to engage in their own form of nesting. My daughter is on her bed, changing the dresses on her dolls. My son is up in his loft space, playing with his knights and trolls. D is taking a long bath and I lie on the bed, watching the breeze blow through the tall cypress tree outside the window. It’s my favorite view and the first image that comes to mind when I think of our home in Dublin. For the first time this view reminds me of the cypress trees down in Patagonia, the ones at Estancia Cristina, the trees that had been planted to break the incessant winds. It seems a long time ago, my standing by the Catherine River, watching a salmon struggle upstream.
Then, apparently, I laugh out loud.
“What’s so funny?” D asks as she comes into the room, wrapped in a towel.
“I was just thinking of Patagonia,” I say.
“Wishing you were there?”
“Just the opposite.” I reach out for my wife and kiss her properly for the first time since we married. “Feel married?” I ask.
“Half. You?”
“Completely,” I say. “I’m done.”
“Oh, no you’re not, mister.”
“Didn’t you see him scratching his head all week?”
“I . . . I . . . ,” is my only response.
“Call Karen, tell her to stop by the drugstore on her way over,” D orders. “We need to be at Dartmouth Square in an hour. The guys are meeting us to go through everything for tomorrow.” D shakes her head. “I mean really, luv.”
My son was recently away, staying on a farm, and apparently brought home a head full of lice. Maybe in the stress of the week dealing with his arm I didn’t notice his incessant scratching, or maybe it’s just now that they are suddenly in full bloom.
Karen arrives with something called Clearlice, Pantene conditioner, baking soda, and a fine-toothed comb. I watch D’s gentle and affectionate patience with my son as she drops everything and spends an hour tending to him. They laugh when she shows him the comb covered with the bugs that were in his hair.
“Aw, cool,” my son exclaims.
“Eew, gross,” my daughter squeals.
We’re half an hour late when we arrive at Dartmouth Square, where the second ceremony will take place. The square is a hedge-bound, tree-lined green with an open field bisected by a trestle-covered path with an ivy-laced gazebo in the center. It’s a simple and elegant neighborhood square encircled by redbrick, Georgian row houses. It could only be in Dublin. We gather under the gazebo. Shelly is there. She is a complex lady, small, redheaded, sarcastic, vulnerable, by turns defensive and loving. She was one of the first of D’s friends whom I connected with years ago. I like her a lot. When D suggested that Shelly preside over the ceremony, the idea was greeted with both confusion and a rolling of eyes by nearly everyone. “She’ll be perfect,” D has maintained from the start. Shelly holds no license to perform weddings, but since the legalities were taken care of with Patricia at the Civil Registration Office, her job is to “bring the spirit into the marriage.”
Ronan, a sandy-haired, always fashionably dressed old friend of D’s who will “stage-manage” the event, and Peter, a rake-thin redhead and former boyfriend of D’s who is handling anything that has to do with our physical presence in the park, are also here, along with D’s bridesmaids, Louise and Karen, and the kids, and Seve. Jackie stops by too—she’ll sing a song to open the ceremony. Everything that will happen at the ceremony tomorrow will be decided now.
“Okay,” D announces, “Andrew, why don’t you take over, show everyone what we were thinking.”
“Oh,” I say. “Okay.” We have not discussed this in any way. I look around the obvious staging area. “Well, I think it might be good if Shelly were positioned here.” I point to a center area under the gazebo. “The musicians could be over here”—I indicate to the left—“and that way—”
“No. Why don’t we put the musicians over here.” D points to where I had just placed Shelly.
“Okay,” I say, “but if you’re going to come in from there . . .” I point off toward the gated entrance to the park.
“No, that’s not good, because then people would block her entrance,” Karen chimes in.
“Why don’t we go back to what we had decided?” Louise suggests.
I look over at Seve, but he won’t meet my eye. My son and daughter are chasing a pair of magpies around the grass. One for sorrow, two for joy.
The girls are discussing the binding of the hands and the twelve ribbons that will be used, each one a different color, each representing a different vow.
“Luv, do we want Shelly to explain what each ribbon means?”
“Well,” I say, “I think a little education might be a good idea, since not too many people know about the whole tying-the-knot ritual.”
D considers this. “Um, no,” she says. “It’ll take too long. We don’t need it. Should we have the big cushions for the kids to sit on in the front?”
“I think kids in front is a bad idea,” I say, “they’ll get bored and start—”
“Yeah, the cushions will have to go in front,” D says; the girls agree and the discussion turns to flowers.
I walk over to Seve. “You’re doing great,” he says to me.
By six o’clock that evening, we are all bathed and dressed and gathering at D’s parents’ home for their intimate dinner for forty. Margot and Colm are in their element—entertaining, serving, and laughing, racing back and forth to the kitchen to get drinks. There are flowers everywhere.
“The house looks beautiful,” I tell Margot as she zooms past.
“All smoke and mirrors, Andrew, my love,” she sings out. “Smoke and mirrors.” And she’s gone.
D’s aunts and uncles are here, her bridesmaids come in and create a fuss, a few of our friends from New York sip drinks and lean against walls. My eldest brother and my mother are here. They arrived yesterday, in time for the welcome drink.
People are milling about, beginning to enjoy themselves, drinking, and then like clockwork, everyone is sitting down, somehow, around the tables that have been set up in the living room. D’s brothers are serving as waiters. The starters come out and are cleared and then the main course is presented and I watch everything swirl in front of me.
During dessert, my friend Lawrence, who came over from London, raps on his glass with his knife, silencing the gathering.
“Speech, Andrew, speech!” he calls out. It’s just like my old friend to embarrass me.
I rise. “Thank you, Lawrence,” I say, my voice filled with sarcasm that some in the room snicker at. Briefly, I thank my mother and brother for making the long trip, and D’s family for the evening they’ve given us, then I sit back down. It’s not much of a speech. Luckily, none of D’s family are even in the room to hear it.
A little while later, D rises and makes an emotional toast, thanking her parents and brothers and family, and welcoming all the Americans who made the arduous journey. The love she feels for everyone present on this occasion is evident. Around the room, eyes begin to well up, and when she finishes, the room bursts into warm and loving applause, grateful for the release.
D will sleep with our daughter at the hotel next door to her parents’ house tonight. I take my son the few blocks home.
We settle at the kitchen table and share a late-night slice of toast.
“Can you cut the crust off, Dad?” my son asks beside me at the table.
“You ate two servings of pâté tonight, for God’s sake. I think you’re old enough to realize that the crust is the best part.”
He takes a bite. “It’s actually pretty good.”
I tousle his hair and we sit in silence. There is a pure, still place in me that remains mine alone. It is that place I first encountered as a child in my front yard, under the stars, it is the place from which I move out into the world, the place from which so much that is good in my life has sprung. Over the years my willful isolation and separation, my urge to flee, my feelings of being misunderstood and ultimately alone in the world, all grew from a desire to shield that solitary place. But what I’ve come to see in the past months of travel is that these battlements I’ve erected ultimately ensure the creation of all they are trying to safeguard against. The revelation of my journeying is that so many of my defenses, so many of the protective choices I have lived by, behavior that has dictated so many of my actions and created much of my persona in the world, are both unnecessary and counterproductive. The realization is at once liberating and already deeply familiar.
The softness of love I have experienced with D has made unnecessary that hard shell of my defensive reaction to the world, and it feels at this moment as if that love has been waiting for me this entire time, just under a silk cloth that took only a gentle breeze to uncover.
I let my son climb into bed with me and we read the final chapter of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The last of the spoiled children are disposed of, and Charlie, his grandpa Joe, and Willy Wonka step into the Great Glass Elevator and rocket up, breaking through the roof of the factory into the light of day to collect the rest of Charlie’s family.
The early morning of our (second) wedding day begins bright and clear. But by the time Seve arrives, white clouds have begun to bunch up and push quickly across the sky. Seve doesn’t have much to say this morning, and as I’m putting on my tie, Conor, Louise’s partner, arrives in his old beat-up green Mercedes.
“Come on, kiddo, Conor’s here,” I call to my son, who is up in his loft, playing with his trolls. “We’ve got to get going.”
“To where?”
Seve and I look to each other and laugh. “To get married.”
“Again?”
On the ride over, I sit in the back, beside my son. He carries on a running conversation with Conor concerning which Star Wars characters are the best lightsaber fighters. We pass Palmerston Park, a lush green with a small playground. I have often played there with the kids but also remember walking there alone, during less happy times, wondering how D and I would ever get through them and what it would mean for us all if we couldn’t. I concocted elaborate scenarios of transatlantic visitations and hotel stays—these plans would leave me exhausted and despairing and always I decided to walk back in and try again.
Then we pass D’s cousin’s house, where we all stayed one happy Christmas. When we drive through Ranelagh, a village D and I used to visit often when we first got together, suddenly, and without knowing why, I am choking back tears, on the verge of completely losing it. I look out the window at the Spar market with the stacks of peat bricks piled high out front. We pass the shuttered pizza shop where we used to eat; when did that close? Then we’re under the LUAS tracks that take the commuters into the city center, and when we make a right and a quick left, Dartmouth Square appears in front of us.
The gazebo has scores of roses woven into the ivy, and two large candles in glass cases flank the place where Shelly will stand. Three huge pillows are laid out for the children to sit on. The musicians, a cello and two violins, are getting themselves organized. A large table is set with food, olives and cheeses and vegetables and sliced meats, and wine is on ice. A truck that will serve hot finger food and dripping chocolate to the children is in position. Half a dozen tables with sun umbrellas and chairs have been scattered around the lawn. The most elegant portable toilets I have ever seen are parked just outside the square. All of D’s twice-changed—fifty-times-changed—plans are falling perfectly into place.
My son is racing across the open lawn, the way he always does here. I don’t know where Seve has gone. The wind is blowing softly and there’s really nothing for me to do but stand around and wait.
Then I look up and see a family enter the gate on the east side of the park. They’re all dressed up, and then I realize they are here for the ceremony. I turn around and from another entrance, two more couples, dressed sharply, drift into the park. Then suddenly, from all sides, people begin to appear, as if summoned, and within minutes well over a hundred wedding guests have gathered. My mother and brother arrive. D’s brothers are here. I see some of D’s cousins and uncles and aunts, and other people I don’t recognize, and then our celebrant, Shelly, walks up, looking very self-possessed in a deep blue dress. She greets me with a typically self-aware, “Hello, Andrew.”
We’re ready to begin but the bride’s mother has not arrived. Since D’s father will walk her over from Shelly’s house beside the park, he has been here for some time. I thought D’s brother Tom was supposed to pick up Margot, but I see him and his children across the park.
“George.” I walk up to D’s younger brother. “Any idea where your mother is?”
His eyes grow as big as saucers. Quickly, he pulls out his phone.
I see D’s other brother. “Hey, Colm, any idea who was bringing your mother?”
His face goes white. “Oh, Jay-sus, was I supposed to pick her up?”
D’s brother Tom comes over. “Where’s Mum?”
“There’s no answer at the house,” George says.
“She probably can’t find the phone,” Colm says. “Look, I’ll go and get her, I’ll be back in ten minutes. Just sit tight.” And he races off toward his jeep.
A call comes down from Ronan, who is with D. “What are we waiting for? We’re getting a little anxious up here. Let’s go.”
“Just tell them we’re getting the musicians set. Don’t mention anything about her mother,” I say.
People are starting to look at their watches.
And then, marching regally through the gate to the park comes Margot, in a long and flowing black and cream kimono, with dashes of silver and red. The kimono, a gift from D, got stuck in the door as she was leaving home. She didn’t have a key with her, a giggling fit ensued, and she spent twenty minutes slowly inching the dress out the door so as not to rip it.
“But we’re all set now, Andrew, my love.” She grins and strides to her seat.
The musicians begin to play, then a procession is coming up the street and turning in to the park, led by our daughter, in a delicate silk chiffon sheath blowing in the breeze. She is shivering but beaming and walking proud, carrying a small bouquet of lavender, eucalyptus, and sweet pea, leading her mother to be married. Following her are D’s bridesmaids, tossing rose petals as they come, and then D, in an elegant full-length, cream-colored silk low-cut dress, also carrying a bouquet of lavender and eucalyptus, enters on her father’s arm. She meets me in front of Shelly.
The guests are in a circle around us, some seated on the benches, most standing. My daughter hops up on Margot’s lap and settles in; my son is still racing around the park. At several key intervals during the ceremony—twice when his name is invoked, and another time when the ribbons are laid across our hands and the vows spoken—he appears, standing just behind Shelly, and each time when I catch his eye, he grins, spins, and races off, his energy too much to contain.
The sun dapples down on D through the vines from above. In the first ceremony her attention was tightly focused on us, while today she is somehow both intimate with me and accessible to the entire gathering. One of the stones on her simple necklace is twisted and I reach out and set it right. The first ceremony was surprising for the unexpected emotional power it evoked; this time I find myself comfortable in the public nature of the proceedings. I can feel some of D’s more religious relatives’ silent judgment of our unconventional ceremony, as well as some of D’s friends’ surprise at Shelly’s graceful and eloquent performance. All the varied responses to the love that surrounds us are palpable—and all of them welcome. None of this makes me want to run.
The afternoon is long and loose and exactly what D had said she hoped it would be. All the food is devoured. The wine is drunk. Kids and parents play soccer. A kite is flown. The face painter has created a giant blue butterfly on my daughter’s cheek. My son, who loves doing long strings of cartwheels, has learned to do them one handed, his heavy cast on the other arm. Music that comes out over speakers I hadn’t noticed has D and her bridesmaids dancing on the lawn. In the course of the afternoon, a few brief and light rain showers roll through. Each time, the Americans rush under the gazebo.
“Oh, what a shame,” some say.
The Irish remain out in the rain, which always passes quickly, and proclaim it a “glorious afternoon—gives the grass a little glisten.”
When things eventually wind down, we head home for an hour before moving over to the family-run twelve-room hotel beside D’s parents’ home for the ceili.
For months now, D has been telling me I am going to dance, and for months I’ve been equivocating—“We’ll see how my knee is doing,” I’d say, or would simply ignore the topic when she brought it up. But there is no avoiding it any longer.
Jerry, who will shout out instructions as we dance, is a small, frail-looking man with wispy gray hair shooting off in all directions. He stands beside four musicians—there’s a fiddle, a bodhran drum, a concertina accordion, and a flute. The musicians are seated in front of the fireplace in the restaurant that’s been cleared of tables. Chairs line the walls. Windows of stained, leaded glass look out onto the parking lot. The ceiling is low.
Irish ceili dancing is not dissimilar to American square dancing, except with better music and an urgency backing it, often fueled by large quantities of alcohol. Jerry lines us up in rows of four and begins to explain the moves and how each line will shift and stomp and twirl and spin and shuffle and move on, swapping partners all the while. His lengthy and complex directions are impossible to follow. Everyone looks at each other and shrugs and shakes their heads. I begin to feel embarrassed. This is a terrible idea. It will be a disaster.
“This one is called ‘The Siege of Ennis,’ ” Jerry calls out. And then the music starts. The bodhran rat-a-tats out an incessant beat we can never compete with, the fiddle rips into a searing pace, the accordion swells below it, while the flute dances above.
Jerry shouts out, “One-two-three-four,” and suddenly we are shifting and stomping and twirling and spinning and shuffling and moving on, switching partners, and repeating the process, shifting and stomping and twirling and spinning and shuffling and moving on. Now Margot is in my arms, and then someone I don’t know at all, and then Colm steps on my toe, or did I crash into him? Then D is back in my arms and then Seve goes roaring past. Everyone is both focused and laughing. The music is ripping and we’re swirling and switching partners again and the music is building and we’re spinning and swapping again and again and again and then, impossibly, the music gets even faster and then it comes to a climax and it all stops and everyone is left gasping for air and laughing, hanging all over each other.
“Let’s do it again!” I hear myself shout.
Breathing hard, D turns to me with a look of thrilled surprise. She grabs my face in her hands and kisses me hard on the mouth. In this instant, I am all of myself—that shy kid playing in the woods near my home, the guy who snuck into college, and then made those movies, and then found his way around the world. I’m a father and a son. And a husband. In this instant, I am all of it, and I’m happier, and freer, than I ever recall being.
“Now you’re Irish,” she shouts to me over the laughter.
“This one is called ‘Shoe the Donkey,’ ” Jerry sings out, and begins another set of elaborately impossible directions. Jackets are peeled and ties ripped off. My daughter appears and jumps up into my arms and the band kicks into a jig. I’m holding her and we’re swinging and twirling and stomping. Her thin arms are wrapped around my neck and we’re laughing. My arm feels as if it will break under her weight as we swing and twirl and stomp, but I won’t put her down and I hope she’ll remember this for her entire life, because I will.
After “The Walls of Limerick” and “The Easy Brush Dance” and a few more, the band takes a break.
Up at the bar, I try to get the bashful Americans to come dancing. D’s friend Bibb and her husband, Sean, are reluctant.
“Come on, you’ll love it,” I shout, inches from their faces.
I’m either spitting all over them or my sweat is flying onto their faces—either way, they take a step back. When D walks by, Bibb grabs on to her.
“Your husband has turned into Mr. Riverdance,” she says.
When I go back downstairs, the band has started again. And there is my son, on the dance floor. He is holding D’s father’s hand. My son’s old friend and new cousin Tristan is holding Colm’s other hand. The three are high-stepping and laughing so hard I’m certain they will all tumble to the ground. Eventually Colm has to stop and my son goes off on his own. He is deep in the mix on the dance floor, twirling, kicking, stomping, and jumping, the only child in the sea of pulsing adults. He is without a care.
Much, much later, I try to get him to sleep in one of the small rooms of the hotel. I lie down next to him on the single bed. The music can still be heard through the closed door. He seems so grown-up and still so young. He has never been up this late.
“What time is it, Dad?”
“Almost two,” I say.
We lie still in the dark; we’re both breathing fast, just from excitement.
“How am I ever going to get to sleep with that music playing?”
“I don’t know,” I tell him, “but you have to.” We’re quiet a little while longer.
“I love you so much, Dad.”
“I love you so much, kiddo.”
“Dad?”
“Yes?”
“I’m glad you got married.”
“You are?” I can feel tears burning behind my closed eyelids. “That means so much to me.”
“Yeah,” my son says, “I got to drink six Cokes tonight.”
Shortly before three I find D huddled in a corner with several of her girlfriends. “I don’t want to interrupt this coven, but I’m going to bed,” I say.
D rises and kisses me. “You all right, luv?”
“I’m good, I just have a little headache. And it’s three in the morning.”
“I’ll be in soon.”
I join my daughter, who is in the bedroom next to my son’s room. She’s asleep in a large bed and I slip in beside her and wrap her up in my arms until she squirms away in her sleep. Soon the door is opened and light floods across the white covers as D enters with a large pint glass filled with ice and water. She shimmies out of her dress and gets into bed on the other side of our daughter. We sigh and reach across our sleeping child and hold hands for an instant in the night.
“I brought you some water for your headache.”
She lifts the glass off the side table. I reach over to receive it. Our hands collide in the dark and the full glass falls and spills all over the bed. Quickly I slide our daughter to one side.
I rush to the bathroom and take the two towels and lay them across the bed, trying to soak up as much water as possible, but the bed is sopping. There’s nothing we can do. We laugh quietly in the dark.
We climb back into bed. I’m hanging off the edge, rolled onto my side, the wet towel beneath me. D is wedged over on the far side of the bed; our daughter is lying across her chest so as not to get wet. It’s three thirty in the morning. We need to get up at eight to catch a plane to Africa.
“Everything you ever dreamed of for your wedding night?” I ask in the dark.
“Perfect, luv,” D says.